Move your WordPress site to a new domain in 2 minutes

If you are a WordPress developer, or you just drafted your WordPress based site on a local machine and want to move it to its final location / domain, then you will most probably need to change all the links in your posts, pages, media … basically everywhere.

Luckily there is an easy solution for that. Read further to find out how.

Changing the URL under Settings > General is one step, but it is not enough. And it shouldn’t be the first step!

What you need is the Velvet Blues Update URLs plugin for WordPress. Go ahead and install it, it will make the move of your site a child’s play.

To make the sitemove trouble free, do the following:

After installing the Velvet Blues plugin go to Tools > Update URLs.

Enter your current (old) URL with http:// and everything.

Then enter your new URL below. (Make sure they are correct!!!)

Check the appropriate checkboxes where you want to make the changes. (I usually check all, EXCEPT the last one.)

Hit the blue update button.

Now go to Settings > General and enter your new URL into the 2 fields and hit ‘Save changes’. This will log you out.

Move your site to the new location / domain.

And you are set. 🙂

Sounds easy, no? Well, because it is. All your links are cared for. Beside the time needed to move your files to a new location, the whole procedure takes about 2 minutes.

In case you run into any trouble during the process (you never know, it can happen), and cannot log in any more, because the domain is already changed under Settings > General then don’t despair. Go to your database (I use phpMyAdmin) and open your Options table. You will need to change the option_value where the option_name is ‘siteurl’ and ‘home’. Then you can redo the above process.